Literature and the “Human” in the Age of Biopolitics: Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The rapid rise of biotechnology as a multibillion-dollar industry in the late twentieth century yielded new possibilities for understanding, manipulating, and managing human life. Marking this turn as “the entry of life into history,” Michel Foucault proposed the theory of “biopolitics” and “biopower to suggest how the state exercises control through the administration of human bodies and the management of life. Various public and scholarly narratives on Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells emerged in this context. The story of HeLa—the first immortal human cells that survived outside the body—and its relations to its unwitting donor incite philosophical, political, and economic challenges to the Foucauldian approaches to the idea of “human.” Most of the public and scholarly narratives on Lacks and HeLa deal with the thorny political, social, and ethical dilemmas that involve the development of biotechnology and associated capitalist interests in dealing with human bodies. At the same time, various ongoing assumptions about racial and gender hierarchies and social inequities displayed in many of these narratives also produced alternative line of accounts that show how those assumptions have structured social and scientific practices and thereby reveal why tensions continue to surface with any challenge to conventional definitions of the human. Focusing on the lives of Lacks and her family, Rebecca Skloot’s nonfiction novel, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010), redirects our attention to the private stories of the individual. On the one hand, Skloot’s re-imagining of Lacks’s personal histories and private memories give voice to those who had been mostly silenced or neglected in the larger public discussions of HeLa. At the same time, however, Skloot’s imaginative creation of Lacks’s “real-life story” calls attention to what is at stake in writing about the histories of the underrepresented subjects for it constantly exposes the writer to the dangers of misappropriation. By posing the difficulties and problems which occur in the representation of individual memories, the text calls attention to both the writers’ and readers’ endeavors to challenge the essentializing forces of the dominant narratives and highlights the importance of “educated guess” in reassessing the individual “counter-memories.”